System provides real-time video, photos and data on all 45 schools in the Frisco, Texas, Independent School District.

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It started with a Frisco, Texas, Independent School District official at a national education conference admiring some software that gave first responders inside information, like floor plans, on a school district in case they have to respond to an incident at one of the schools. Independent School District officials sat down with city officials, including representatives from the Frisco police and fire departments and the city’s IT staff to gauge buying the off-the-shelf software. But during discussions, they realized they could do it better themselves with existing resources.

What resulted is the Situational Awareness for Emergency Response (SAFER) system, which provides police, fire and emergency medical responders with real-time video, still photos and data on all 45 schools in the district. So when first responders are called to a situation at one of the schools, they can view floor plans, live video (in some cases) and photos of the building, providing situational awareness not experienced before SAFER, which was conceived in 2008 and became fully operational in 2009.

“Previously we didn’t have the plans from the school so officers were going there blind,” said Lt. Jason Jenkins of the Frisco Police Department. “Unless they’d been there before, they were going with no expectation of the layout of the school other than what they could see from the outside.”

Jenkins said SAFER has been especially helpful to the night shift, which is accustomed to responding to multiple alarms at the same time. “The officers are saving a lot of time when the alarms are going off and assessing where they really need to focus.”

The fire department used to carry around drawings of the inside of the schools to use when it arrived on a call. Just viewing the drawings and gathering situational awareness could take several minutes. Now it’s as easy as calling up the schools “intelligence” on the mobile data computer (MDC).

In addition to the geo-referenced floor plans and the live video feeds from more than 2,000 cameras, first responders have access to hazardous materials inventory, aerial maps, Pictometry, contact information for school officials and automated vehicle location (AVL).

“Not only can we do the whiteboard-type thing, but you also have the AVL integrated into it so you could be working with a really large incident and drop a hazardous materials plume into the map,” said Assistant Fire Chief Paul Siebert. “You can communicate that information out to fire and
police. In the past, verbal descriptions over the radio was how you relayed that.”

Siebert cited an example of how SAFER has already been successful. Police and fire were called to an incident where police had set up a barricade. On the way there, the fire department called up information from the area on the MDC and figured out where to go. “We asked [police on the scene] ‘Do you want us at this intersection?’” Siebert said. “We reduced maybe five minutes on the radio and stayed out of the way.”

SAFER has allowed the fire department to reduce its response level when it’s determined through the system that the call isn’t for a disastrous incident.

For example, when a call comes in about a fire inside a building, the department automatically sends three engines, a truck, an ambulance, heavy rescue and a chief. “We were en route to one of the schools and we were able to see that school was operating normally, that kids were walking down the hallways, so we recognized that it may not be as critical an alarm as it seemed,” Siebert said.

They then reduced the lights and sirens to just the chief’s vehicle and the first two engines. “That reduces the risk to the traveling public,” Siebert said. “We’re going through intersections, and it also reduces the wear and tear on the trucks.”

Morphing Into Phase Two

All involved said SAFER has enhanced a spirit of collaboration that was already in place, thus its success.

Jim McKay is the editor of Emergency Management. He lives in Orangevale, Calif., with his wife, Christie, daughter, Ellie, and son, Ronan. He relaxes by fly fishing on the Truckee River for big, wild trout. Jim can be reached at jmckay@emergencymgmt.com.

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